When Percy had told Tonett that he would keep her in his sight until she was done internalizing the blessing, he might have neglected to mention how difficult it would be for the Blue to leave the range of his sensory domain, even if she wanted to. When arranged in a perfect circle, his army of sentries allowed him to scan everything within twenty-five kilometres of his host, though he could only focus on a fraction of that area at any given time.
Either way, Tonett and Doh were currently swimming close to Sol, having volunteered to help Percy clear the lake out. The Blues’ personal strength wouldn’t have as much of an impact when diluted in a pool of tens of thousands of soldiers, so they had judged that their talents would be more useful in Percy’s team of elites than at the helm of the armies defending the new wall.
The downside was that his host’s fellow leaders would be too busy slaughtering aquatic animals to preside over the rest of the operation, but there were plenty of experienced Greens to replace them.
After some back and forth, Doh and Tonett had made a few minor changes to the structure of Percy’s task force. Instead of giving him ten Greens and five hundred Yellows as he had originally requested, they had assigned him six Greens and six hundred of their fastest Yellows, splitting them into six smaller groups led by a powerful mage each.
Percy methodically cycled through forty-four of his sentries, scanning the lake for any creature that could pose a threat to the Melodians in the foreseeable future – be it a group of Razor-Fanged Frogs or a lone Glass Serpent. Some beasts were extremely good at hiding within the muddy lakebed, but the passive Mana Sense and Soul Vision built into Percy’s Sage’s Pond luckily rooted everything out without exception.
Going against their original intentions, he and the Melodian leaders begrudgingly agreed to skip individual Red beasts this time, since there were too many to kill within a week, and the creatures weren’t strong enough to deal much damage by themselves. However, the natives would have to routinely sweep through the lake in the future, to ensure that the surviving animals never evolved or multiplied enough to cause trouble.
Whenever Percy spotted a viable target, he identified the group of Melodians closest to the enemy, taking control of the sentry accompanying the corresponding Green-born. Using the construct’s clawed digits, he marked the location of the target on a map of the lake drawn on waterproof parchment, directing the band of Yellow-borns toward the unfortunate beasts.
Every time his subordinates cleared out an area, Percy took control of the sentries located farther back, moving them forward to scout out a new section of the lake. Things progressed smoothly for the most part, but a school of fish would occasionally try to swim in the opposite direction from his army, threatening to escape to areas that they had already cleared.
That was what Doh and Tonett were there for. As Blues, they could move faster than anyone else, intercepting the fleeing creatures and slaughtering entire packs of them before they had the chance to ruin Percy’s efforts or force his army to start over.
Unfortunately, Sol couldn’t control Percy’s sentries, so she couldn’t help him scan the lake faster. This appeared to be something that only his and Micky’s main bodies, clones and familiars could do, but not the clones’ hosts.
The good news was that Sol could still examine her immediate surroundings through her own copy of the Sage’s Pond, protecting herself so that her spectral guest could work uninterrupted.
Micky was the only one who didn’t directly contribute to the mission in any way – well, except for the fact that it was his own spell that everything hinged on.
The Huehuan was too busy drawing seals inside Sol’s first core. Multitasking and Clarity helped him compensate for the lack of Percy’s assistance and the fact that Sol was constantly circulating mana through her sternum, inadvertently making his job harder.
Despite locating and eliminating beasts with surgical precision, Percy’s army was moving a bit too slowly for his liking. There were simply too many creatures to kill, so the task force often had to spend several hours hunting at the same spot before they could move on.
Another issue was that Percy’s subordinates had to drag the carcasses out of the lake, piling them along the shore. The creatures were killed with soul magic, so there were no physical injuries to leak blood into the water, yet the Melodians couldn’t allow the bodies to rot inside the lake, otherwise they would only be accelerating the water’s pollution instead of preventing it.
Furthermore, leaving the mana-rich carcasses inside the lake would give the smaller animals that Percy’s army had ignored enough food to evolve into genuine threats.
Two days into the operation, Sol and her fellow leaders received word that the construction team was about halfway done. Thankfully, Percy’s team was even farther along, having retained a comfortable lead over the land-based units. If things continued like this, the mission was going to succeed.
Which… was exactly why he wasn’t very surprised when something went wrong.
‘How the hell are there so many of these things gathered together?!’ he couldn’t help but curse.
One of his sentries had stumbled upon a massive school of spiky eel-like creatures. Percy struggled to count them all, but he estimated that there were over three thousand of the aquatic monsters concentrated within a roughly-circular area about five hundred metres wide.
More than half of the eels were at Yellow, their serpentine bodies twice as long as a Melodian was tall, though only about half as thick as a person’s waist. The rest were Orange and much smaller, but Percy still couldn’t help but wonder how so many powerful creatures had survived in the same location without starving or killing one another.
‘I’m guessing that they spread out to hunt, before grouping up again for safety,’ Sol replied, offering a possible explanation.
She was probably right, since Percy had seen a few individuals and smaller schools of the creatures earlier, though it appeared that he had caught the majority of them at the worst possible moment. Perhaps it would be wiser to wait for them to scatter again before picking them out a few at a time, though he had no idea how long it would take, and the Melodians were already starting to look quite tired.
“What’s wrong?” Doh asked after noticing Sol’s crestfallen expression.
Percy explained the situation to the Blues and Greens in charge of his army after calling everyone over.
Tonett sighed. “This is a problem, but I suppose one that we should have seen coming. If there was going to be a large group of powerful beasts anywhere in the lake, it’s no wonder we found it near the south coast.”
Doh nodded grimly.
The Blues didn’t elaborate, but it wasn’t difficult to figure out what they meant. This was the side of the lake closest to the destroyed Melodian city. The task force had left it for last because it would take the construction team longer to reach it than anywhere else.
Since there was no settlement nearby, it was obviously much easier for terrestrial beasts to enter the lake from that direction unimpeded, inadvertently delivering themselves to the hungry eels on a silver platter, and making the aquatic horrors more likely to breed and nest.
“What do we do?” a Green with a horizontal scar on his nose asked. “If all six of our groups work together, I’m sure that we can eradicate them all.”
“Are you insane?!” another protested. “With so many powerful eels in close proximity, there’s no way we’ll make it out unscathed. Even if we win, we’ll definitely lose hundreds of mages.”
“What choice do we have?” the first Green insisted. “We’ve already invested so much time and manpower into this project. If we fail to cleanse the lake, it will all have been for nothing. Beasts from the surrounding regions will destroy the wall and fill in the vacuum of power in the lake within days, forcing us to start over. By the time we’re ready, hundreds of additional kids will have died from the polluted water. Losing a fraction of our task force sounds like a small price to pay to ensure our success.”
The Yellow-borns who were within earshot of their leaders broke into chatter, soon splitting into a pair of bickering camps: those willing to die for the mission and those who didn’t want to take this risk.
“What if we just ignore the eels for now?” a third Green suggested. “Our goal was to prevent any aquatic beasts from fleeing the lake and attacking the construction team, but these eels don’t look like they can survive outside the water anyway. I doubt they’ll endanger the people working on the wall.”
Percy shook his borrowed head, injecting himself into the conversation. “Keeping the construction team safe is only one of our objectives. Don’t forget that we’re doing this to prevent the beasts from polluting the water.”
In theory, the eels were bound to starve to death now that the Melodians had removed most of their prey from the water and were planning to prevent more beasts from blindly wandering into the lake.
The problem was that the serpentine monsters would likely turn to cannibalism in their desperation. Even the most ravenous creatures generally avoided eating their own when they had other sources of food, but extreme hunger would eventually drive them mad, flooding the water with blood and gore.
Even if the resulting pollution was only a fraction of what the Melodians had previously dealt with, the dead eels would provide opportunities for weaker animals to evolve, sparking a chain reaction that could lead to the wall being attacked before the next purging mission.
“Well, what do you suggest?” Tonett asked, looking at Sol and, by extension, Percy expectantly. “We clearly can’t leave the eels alone, but the group is too large and powerful to eliminate safely.”
To the burly woman’s credit, there was no hint of accusation in her voice. Percy had honestly expected her to snap at him for running into an issue after promising to cleanse the lake, but she was apparently smart enough to understand that her people wouldn’t have done any better without him.
Examining the school of spiky creatures carefully, he pondered over his options, eventually coming up with a plan he felt confident in.
“I’ll kill them all myself.”